Hey friends 👋
Segment is a Customer Data Platform also known as CDP.
The main objective behind CDPs lies in aggregating, processing, distributing, and storing customer data. 💽
Segment has proven to be a valuable and versatile tool in the CDP industry, making it one of the market leaders in its category. 🏆
Now, the open-source ecosystem provides various attractive alternatives to Segment. 🦾
In this week's article, we want to share our 5 favourite open-source alternatives to Segment.
With this in mind, let's get into it!
Rudderstack
1️⃣ RudderStack provides data pipelines to collect data from applications, websites and SaaS platforms.
2️⃣ Its API architecture and SDKs ensure developers can gather data from different sources and leverage them into their applications without disruptions.
3️⃣ RudderStack is highly versatile and integrates with over 90+ tools and data warehouse destinations. Rudderstack is also compatible with the Segment API.
💰 Pricing
- RudderStack costs $0 for 1M monthly events and includes 15+ SDKs, 200+ cloud destinations and reverse ETL.
- The starter pack provides 3M monthly events and starts off at $500 (additional benefits include email support, near real-time data and 99.5% uptime SLA).
Snowplow
1️⃣ Snowplow is made with developers in mind. It currently offers over 20 SDKs to get data from the web, mobile, and server-side applications.
2️⃣ The known feature of Snowplow is the use of its unique schema-based approach and validation process. Its architecture ensures reliable data.
3️⃣ Snowplow supports integration with multiple data storage and analysis tools, allowing devs to integrate with known data warehouses such as Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery and Snowflake.
💳 Pricing:
- You can sign up to deploy the SnowPlow Community Edition.
- This is a great alternative for a do-it-yourself solution if you are looking to build early-stage prototypes.
- You can expect to manage your infrastructure, self-host QA, create dev pipelines and build non-production workloads.
Jitsu
1️⃣ Jitsu is another self-hosted platform providing real-time data collection from websites and apps.
2️⃣ If you check Jitsu's documentation, you will see well-written instructions for deploying at various scales.
3️⃣ Jitsu is built on Bulker, an open-source data warehouse ingestion engine. This allows it to be a versatile platform which supports various SDKs for event collection, including HTML snippets, React, and an NPM package. It also has a feature that allows it to be compatible with Segment's API.
💷 Pricing:
- Jitsu provide a free version with 200k events/month, including events debugger and clickhouse UI access.
- The Business pack starts at $99, including 2M events/month and configuration API. Beyond this point, you pay $40 for every additional 1M events.
Tracardi
1️⃣ Tracardi is designed to be an API-first, low-code or no-code platform that integrates with various infrastructures.
2️⃣ Being open-source, Tracardi receives many contributions which connect with modern tools. This allows organisations to develop the latest sales or customer engagement processes.
3️⃣ Tracardi has been developed to personalise user experiences through real-time frontend apps.
💶 Pricing:
- The free version provides limited collected events per second but no event validation.
- It also includes event and profile orchestration and some simple automation.
- Passed a certain scale needed, Tracardi provides a commercial version.
Apache Unomi
1️⃣ Apache Unomi is a Java open-source customer data platform. It is designed to manage customers, leads, and visitors' data and helps personalise customer experiences.
2️⃣ Its plugin architecture and ElasticSearch allow scalability and smooth integration with various data sources.
3️⃣ If you want to focus on data privacy and security, Apache Unomi can be a great option! It is designed with privacy at the forefront, with features that focus on respecting GDPR rules.
💸 Pricing:
- As long as you comply with the Apache License 2.0, Apache Unomi is free to use.
- Depending on your needs, deploying and maintaining Apache Unomi may still involve costs related to infrastructure, support and maintenance, integration & customisation etc.
In this article, we discovered 5 alternatives to Segment.
I recommend you look into each alternative and determine what service best suits your current (or future) needs.
In the meantime, I invite you to consider supporting these projects by starring them on GitHub.
(We are not affiliated with them. We just think that great projects deserve great recognition.) ⭐️
See you next week,
Your Dev.to buddy 💚
Bap
If you want to join the self-proclaimed "coolest" server in open source 😝, you should join our discord server. We are here to help you on your journey in open source. 🫶
Top comments (14)
Unfortunately the Tracardi Information is not correct:
Tracardi offers both open-source and commercial versions, each tailored to meet diverse customer needs. The primary distinction lies in their approach to data collection: the commercial version leverages data streams for higher data throughput, while the open-source version utilizes APIs without imposing limits on event collection. Despite the scalability challenges associated with its architecture, the open-source version has proven its capability by effectively managing installations with over 1 billion events. Additionally, Tracardi enhances user experiences with extended automation features, accessible in both versions, showcasing its versatility and robustness across different scales of operation.
Hey there, you are right; most of the alternatives above provide paid services. After a certain scale, passing on to paid plans and discussing necessities with the respective CDP is necessary. We assumed people would discover this after experimenting with the above alternatives. Nevertheless, you are right to point this out, and I have added an edit to reflect this. Thanks! 🙏
Have been working with the Tracardi open source CDP for sometime now and have found that it meets the needs and as required is easily extendable for just about any use case that has come along. Also have found the Tracardi member community very inviting and helpful. Worth a look.
Great to hear - thanks for sharing your experience Matt 😄
I have been using the opensource version of tracardi for about 3-4 months. The functionality that is already implemented in it out of the box is enough to just start using it in work. If something is missing, there are ready-made plugins to work with its api, which simply expands the boundaries of the software, making it limitless. Plus developer support, forum support - you will never be left alone with a problem. Only positive work experience.
Thanks for sharing your experience. 🌟
Solid overview! I'd love to see the table with face-to-face comparison, that would add to the value of the article
Thanks for this, Matija - just so I get this right, are you referencing creating an Excel-like type of table? If so, I do see how that would be clearer - thanks!
Interacted with Rudderstack team, amazing product.
That's good to know! Thanks for sharing your experience on this Aravind :)
If there are open-source alternatives we have missed, please share them below 👇🙂
Rudderlab's "Elastic license" is not open source, it's a source-available license.
Tracardi is also not open source, it's what is called open core...
You are right. Tracardi provides paid features and this is why open core would be the best suited term for it. Thanks for that. 🙂
Unomi - if you have tons of time to study the code and research how it works, you're welcome. On their forum is just creating an activity, but in truth no one answers you. there is nothing in the documentation. Any youtube tutorials? I guess they haven't heard of it.